With the advent of the information technology age, data center have become critical to the operation of almost all large scaled enterprises. Illustrative enterprises that rely on data centers include: financial service companies, government agencies, defense operations, hospitals, commercial Websites, etc. As the need to accommodate and process more and more data grows, greater and greater demands are placed onto the infrastructure of the data center.
Issues that must be addressed include: providing an infrastructure that can maintain 24/7 operations; controlling the amount of physical space required; providing the necessary cooling requirements; and managing the power consumption. As availability requirements (i.e., the amount of uptime) placed on data centers increase, these issues will continue to drive up the costs associated with operating data centers.
Power consumed by the equipment found in a data center can account for up to 50% of the total cost of operating such a facility. One of the main culprits of this power consumption lies in the fact that most data centers rely on AC to power the servers and other equipment. In a typical computer power supply distribution architecture, AC power is delivered to a component (e.g., a server), which then converts the power to DC to operate the various controllers, drives, memory, etc., associated with the component. Traditional AC power supplies operate at about a 70% efficiency level, which results in a significant waste of energy resources.
In addition to providing relatively low power efficiency, such configurations also generate a significant amount of heat that must be dealt with. The thermal load problem is further exacerbated by the use and introduction of technologies such as “blading” into the data center architecture. Blading utilizes high density blade chassis installed in cabinets into which “blades” can be plugged. Each blade incorporates a device (such as a server) that is significantly smaller and denser than traditional rack mounted components.
One solution that would address the issues faced by data centers is to utilize a DC-based architecture to power the equipment in the data centers. Unfortunately, no DC-based architectural infrastructure has been developed or proposed that will adequately address the major operational issues faced by data centers. Accordingly, a need exists for a DC-based architecture for data centers.